Equipment breakdown can pose a serious problem to manufacturing companies, including companies in the electronics/optoelectronics industry. Considering global market values and competition, companies wish to avoid falling behind in production because of equipment breakdown.
Successful companies usually mitigate the risk of equipment breakdown by actively investing in equipment maintenance and management to ensure a high level of productivity. This involves equipment monitoring and status evaluation, down to a component level. Based on the results of such monitoring and evaluation, companies may make informed decisions to carry out timely maintenance, that obviate the need for in-production shut downs.
With respect to the electronics/optoelectronics industry, manufacturing equipment includes, for example, Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) machines and Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) machines, which in turn include controllers. The controllers may control movement of materials including reactants, precursors, or products, in a pipeline network. Controller malfunction may cause lower yield, if not an entire wasted production.
Existing maintenance practices, however, cannot fulfil the demand for accurate controller monitoring. For example, some controller monitoring methods may transmit false alarms or fail to detect problems.